Do you fancy yourself a music aficionado? What about when it comes to hip hop and rap? Do you MC in front of the mirror to your favorite beats (its ok, we won’t tell). Have you been bouncing to the drum of the urban beat since the early days of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five? Know every word to every song on the Beastie Boys’ groundbreaking album License to Ill?

Now what if I asked about your ability to look beyond just the lyrics, and interpret and evaluate the deeper meaning and skillfulness of the MC spitting the raps you love? How do you think you would fare when compared to other hip hop enthusiasts? Well thanks to Rap Genius, there’s now an “app” for that.

The new site Rapgenius.com incorporates all of the above questions into an interactive platform that allows users to provide interpretations and evaluations of the lyrics contained in their favorite rap and hip hop songs. Any user is welcome to add information and explanations of the lyrics on an “unexplained song.” However once a song is “100% explained,” you must have a rap genius IQ of 500 or greater to add comments to that song.

If your IQ grows high enough and you become a truly masterful rap genius, you graduate to become a moderator of the site. It is truly an interesting amalgamation of urban/street with geek chic development work, and should find a home in any hip hop loving social media enthusiast’s bookmarks.

RapGenius.com, your hip hop musical genius… rewarded.

So check out RapGenius and while you do, take a gander at the leader board as well as our favorite rap genius contributor, LawyerHead. This guy’s got crazy mad rap genius IQ.

1. Make any credit package purchase of $199.99 or greater and receive an additional 20 bonus credits.

2. Make any credit package purchase of $99.99 or greater and receive an additional 10 bonus credits.

How it works:

Simply make your purchase as you would normally, and once your transaction is complete email customer service at audiomicro [at] audiomicro [dot] com and put in the subject line, “Redeem Holiday Sale Credits – ‘AudioMicro username’ “. We will confirm your purchase amount and put the appropriate number of bonus credits in your account immediately thereafter (It is important you include your username in the subject line for speedy turnaround).

Today we are proud to announce the addition of the Sounddogs sound effects library, adding over 15,000 professional royalty free sound effects to our ever expanding archive. Headed by Rob Nokes, whose credits include such films as X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Real Steel, Million Dollar Baby, Generation Kill, and Seabiscuit, the Sounddogs collection is well known for being a comprehensive, progressive, original collection that also pulls from SoundStorm, a now defunct illustrious sound company that had seven Academy Award Nominations and over two-hundred and fifty feature film credits.

Sounddogs.com was started in August 1996, and went online in May 1997. It was the world’s first online commercial sound effects and production music library long before the Apple iTunes music store. Sounddogs prides itself on having a vast, easily accessible sound library for immediate download (in .aiff, .wav. and .mp3) and packaged on CD/DVD or hard drive as the entire Soundstorm library. In November 2004, Sounddogs acquired the immense sound effects library of SoundStorm, a seven-time nominee and winner of an Academy Award for Best Sound Editing.

Categories within the new Sounddogs collection include ambience, animals, impacts, guns, science fiction, whooshes and everything in between. The addition of Sounddogs brings AudioMicro’s total file count to over 225,000 stock music and sound effects tracks, all pre-cleared for use in creative audio-visual productions. More of Sounddogs 135,000 sound effects recordings will be added in 2011.

Our collection of user generated sound effects and royalty free music continues to grow in both quantity and quality, and we couldn’t be more excited about this burgeoning partnership with the original online sound effects provider, Sounddogs, as we move into 2011.

For more information or to check out the amazing sounds in this collection right away, simply click here.

We here at AudioMicro are very excited that the Holidays are upon us, because with that comes all the wonderful things that go along with them, including of course awesome Holiday Tunes. We thought long and hard, talked to friends, clients and artists to come up with a 10 Quintessential Holiday Tunes list. So without further adieu, here they are:

1. Deck the Halls
2. Joy to the World
3. Silent Night
4. Winter Wonderland
5. The First Noel
6. Jingle Bells
7. We Wish You a Merry Christmas
8. White Christmas
9. We Three Kings
10. Let it Snow

And what would a royalty free music blog post about Christmas tunes be if it didn’t tell you where you could license them all royalty free…? If you click on any of the links below, you will be taken directly to the licensing page for that track. There are some truly unique renditions here.